Tech oddity digest: Adventures with a bizarre volume bug on new MacBook Airs

The bug got patched, but it caused a hilarious few days of total confusion.

30 Rock's Lutz looks a bit like I felt while wondering if my computer was broken.

NBC

At first I thought my mind was going. My wife and I, on vacation recently, had just settled in for an episode from the final season of 30 Rock. I had purchased it from Amazon Instant Video for a couple of bucks because Netflix didn't have the final season yet, and if there is one guaranteed benefit to not being a dirty pirate, it's studio-quality audio and video, right?

Imagine my surprise, then, when the volume began subtly modulating. For 30 seconds, Alec Baldwin and Tina Fey were shouting at me; for 30 seconds, they were whispering. Well, crazy things happen—perhaps the version of the episode shipped over to Amazon had been mastered poorly by some summer intern.

My wife and I watched another episode. The volume shenanigans continued. Surely NBC couldn't cock up two entire episodes of a hit show? I began to think dark thoughts about Amazon and its video service, and I would have continued thinking those dark thoughts except that, a day or two later, I dialed up a Daily Show episode on Hulu. Yet again, the volume fluctuated.

At this point I was getting concerned; my computer was clearly possessed by some mischievous but not wholly malevolent gremlin intent on making constant changes to my audio output levels. How else to explain the fact that the issue persisted across different TV shows and across different distribution platforms? (Though I never noticed the issue when I was playing music in iTunes or through my Rdio subscription, which only made the problem odder. It was video-specific.) The only constant seemed to be my computer, one of the recently released 2013 MacBook Airs.

I had never seen a problem quite like this before, but it quickly became clear that my pricey new machine had an issue. Was it fixable through a software update? Was the hardware bad?

Last week, that question was answered as Apple released "MacBook Air (Mid 2013) Software Update 1.0." Finally skimming through the patch change log on Friday, wondering if this was something worth rebooting my computer for at the moment, I stopped short when I came to the final item on the fix list: "an issue which may cause audio volume to fluctuate during video playback."

(The upgrade also fixes "an issue that in rare instances may cause an intermittent loss in wireless connectivity [and] an issue with Adobe Photoshop which may cause occasional screen flickering.")

As it turns out, I am not crazy, my machine isn't broken, and neither Amazon nor NBC were at fault. Rather an odd issue, but how exciting would life be if all the problems we faced were routine?